Eulogy of a Different Kind
by Awkward Little Boxes
Summary: There are so many ways to say goodbye, to say thank you for the millions of moments etched permanently on my spark, but Soundwave probably says it best without words.


**Summary**: There are so many ways to say _goodbye_, to say _thank you for the millions of moments etched permanently on my spark_, but Soundwave probably says it best without words.

**Notes:**

-This was me experimenting with a narrative voice I've never tried before, while also using a point of view that was incredibly challenging, given what it should and shouldn't know.

-Virtue is not the same as virtuosity; the later is another noun form of virtuoso.

-Ravel's Bolero is the best piece of music I can think of that would be comparable to what I've described.

SCIENCE:

Waves (according to wikipedia) grossly over simplified:

Mechanical: travel through and deform a medium, so for this story anything that is 'sound' or 'pressure' or simply 'frequency'; humans hear from between 20Hz to 20k Hz. Infrasound (anything below 20Hz, with no change to properties, defined only by being sub-audible) can have wavelengths as long as 344km(213.8mi), and therefore very low frequency, roughly a peak every 14 minutes.

Electromagnetic: do not require a medium, they are oscillations in electric and magnetic fields cause by charged particles, so for this story anything that is 'electromagnetic frequency' or 'radiation' or 'emissions' or 'emanation'.

**Disclaimer**: I do not own Transformers or imply any claim to rights; this is written for amusement and not profit.

**Prompt**: Drama

* * *

Eulogy of a Different Kind

* * *

Something had happened.

They'd known it instinctively as soon as they'd been circulated back to life. So they galloped eagerly toward the first continent in their corridor, kicking up fitful waves in their excitement.

It was on the breath of every one of their brethren they met along the way: there had been _great_ change, _terrible_ change. They knew the truth of this; they'd felt the atmospheric tremors and shockwaves even as they tumbled newly reborn in a draft toward the sea, toward the turbulent expanse the organics called the Atlantic.

_The cells have broken down_, their cousins whispered. W_hat rules remain, are chaos! _One had howled as she wheeled by. _We're free to travel where we please, _sighed another.

So they raced. They raced at full blast toward the nearing landmass, sheer exhilaration giving them lift. To be able to travel freely! Unfettered, unbound from their equatorial band!

They all thought to their cyclical tangles with the Westerlies. To the tales that had been whipped around about the wondrous, serrated forests of metal that clawed upward to impossible reaches. Cities, the organics called them, but these were cities far more impressive than any of them could describe from their own circumnavigations. And one of their number knew just where she wanted to go.

Some would split south immediately she knew, as soon as they made landfall. Some would pass over the continent altogether, to explore previously forbidden expanses on the following tract of land. She would travel north along the coast, to the city that had most captivated her when the Westerlies blustered around boastfully.

So as they neared the shoreline she swirled away from her complement of Trades, much the same as many others, and danced up the coastline, giddy with desire for all things new.

But it seemed that with the great unknown change, and with the collapse of planetary rules that had tethered her and her cohort to the tropical lanes, there had also been great devastation.

Great, panoramic devastation.

Slowing to a lazy, winding drift she took the time to listen, _really _listen, and look. And she was surprised. What she had missed while enveloped in the tempest of her sisters, and missed in her mad caper up the coast, was _immense_.

Stretching across the sky high above her were roiling plumes of ash and moisture and debris, painting a menacing palette of heaving, twisting monochrome, from white all the way to darkest black.

But more chilling still was the silence. The silence was absolute, _terrifying._ She could find no trace of the higher life forms anywhere in her purview, no four-leggers, no two-leggers, not even an avian to join her.

Yet she found something else entirely. Another presence with her, in the firmament, something _other_. A radiation that was familiar from many circulations ago, but unnatural and unwanted. There was a surfeit of it now, crowding her in every direction so that she had to wonder at her oblivion. How had she missed this?

Alarmed at the breadth of it, she whipped further north, curling inland periodically to confirm the continued...emptiness. This _other_ had also followed on the heels of wide-area destruction before, but not this vast. And it had never been this saturated.

She screamed up the coastline, taking comfort in the sympathetic frothing of a restless, tossing ocean. She raked just along the surface of the beaches in destructive impotence, leaving cyclones of sand in her wake.

Everything gone. Not a sound, not a life could she find along the south-eastern seaboard; just the malign presence of the _other_ and glimpses of her brethren as out of place as her, and just as terrified.

Then, hundreds of leagues from her destination, she heard it. But she felt it even more. It was a slow, heavy thrum, peaking at wavelengths so long and troughing so deep that she wondered if the continents themselves weren't also unleashed and beginning to stir. Or perhaps it was a signal of life? Surely...surely there'd still be some left in the great city that had so impressed her cousins.

And encouragingly, the closer she pulled to the coordinates she'd memorized so long ago, in a wistful dream of freedom, the more frequencies she could hear, could feel.

But when she descended as a gale upon the bay, she saw that the ruination must be wide-spread indeed. Half a continent away from her landfall and still nothing. There were no wondrous arms of metal and glass grabbing for the heavens here. Just the jagged, broken ribs of a crumbled colossus bleeding rebar and stone.

Even - she noticed - the grave cadence of that thrum had stopped.

What had happened?

She eddied around in a moment of loss and confusion. They had _all_ been tenants on this planet, and though the organics were so young, with such flash-bright and short lives, they'd still shared a home. Then she heated in anger, in _fury_. She thermaled upward until she nearly thinned out of existence, then plummeted to the ground. She crashed into the viscera of the city and howled down tumbled thoroughfares, flinging detritus everywhere in her incandescence.

_What had happened?_

Suddenly, the monolithic tolling started up again, all the previously accompanying frequencies along with it.

Then she saw it.

Movement. The directed movement that only intelligence could coordinate. There was life there! Across the eastern river and at the south end of the island. She rushed over to observe, to hopefully gain understanding.

And when she got there, the movement resolved into three figures, emerging from some subterranean passage, laboring to drag along nets of some sort of debris and picking their way over chaotic spills of masonry.

It was life, yes, but certainly not organic. They seemed to be metal...powered by some crackling energy. Mechanical! Mechanical sentience and life. And astonishingly, the frequencies, all of them, were coming from the largest of the three.

She flooded in for a closer inspection; all of her earlier wrath less than a memory, banished by the fascination of finding something entirely new.

The largest was towering! Larger than any bipedal life she'd ever seen, and she'd been around for them all, from the first to apparently, these last. And it was a complete mess. She circled it and knew, even without a basis for comparison, that the blistered and charred surface color, the pitted body panels, the spider-webbed, toothless glass on the torso, and the broken-off coverings for its eyes and face couldn't be _normal_ for any creature. She was sure also, that life came with symmetry; where there was one limb, had been her observation, there was usually another.

But this mechanical had, instead of a right arm, an angry tantrum of components spitting out of the violent wreck in its shoulder. She could count several different types of cables alone; some bundled and sheathed with frayed insulation, some twisted around each other, some even still twitching, popping, snapping...as if the mechanical had better things to do than worry about a small live current or two. Though, it _had_ taken the time to blunt or bend in the lethal edges along the tears of its body. There were also shorn hydraulics there, and loose, estranged sensors of some sort, and gears that still spun, oblivious and sluggish. Everything on that side of its body was covered in a softly glowing fluid, beautiful in its color and oily shimmer.

The wild snarl of cables had been twisted up, out of the way, into a knot that hung heavily at its side like some sparking, glistening flail. And like some ironically festive tassel, the end of the knot trailed hundreds of tiny filaments, all of them seeming to be lit from the inside - an ethereal, glittering spray of threads that commanded her attention like a lodestone.

Unable to resist she closed in and twined intangible fingers through these tiniest cables; she leafed through them, captivated by their capture and refraction of the stray spears of light constantly piercing through the mutinous cloud cover.

Then, perhaps because the mechanical had sensed her conscious presence, it slowed its walk momentarily and tilted its head; some of the higher frequency harmonics in its steady thrum fading in and out questioningly.

She reluctantly dropped her investigation of its cables and breezed calmly across its torso and along its other arm, curling brief, reassuring tendrils around it as she swept down and away.

The two much smaller mechanicals slowed too. One of them, another biped, tilted its head also, as if in question, but she couldn't hear any communication...she...she could feel something though. All three had tired and thin fields of radiation around them, nothing at all like the _other_; these were clean. And expressive! She had to condense herself to catch the unusually high electromagnetic frequencies, but when she did she found a wealth of emotion conveyed in the modality of their emissions.

From the smaller biped and quadruped came an unease and sense of disconnection, like they were adrift, sail-less, oar-less, and without even a beacon for reference; underlining it was a sad exhaustion, the kind that could sap life away a breath at a time without anyone the wiser. But overlaying it all, perhaps with the tenacity of desperation, was a suffusing sense of _home_. And there, in the shadows of the big one's legs, with its serene emanations that recalled to her the memories of islands - long ago eaten by tectonic hunger - that had stood sentinel for millennia around newly budding life, she could understand their feelings. That sort of solidity and peace was a magnet for the lost and weary.

She flickered around them then, taking it all in: their tattered appearance, with none so ravaged as the biggest; the tight proximity of the smaller two to the big one; the emotions she could feel in their radiation fields - it all spoke to her, that this was a dynamic of Protector and Little Ones. And that they had seen, and had lived through whatever had happened here.

But also that they had lost to whatever had happened here. Lost pieces of a whole.

She flitted ahead of their path, to pool and churn at the end of the disheveled pier they'd been angling for. She wondered if perhaps the thrum that the Protector was creating was actually more than just a signal of life, but a base harmonic for something else instead. And her reasoning, she thought, was justified; the Protector had already threaded a new frequency into its deep and low pattern.

When they caught up to her, they dropped their nets and seemed to sag, as if walking several hundred meters was a harrowing test of their endurance. And, she guessed, it probably was. Her recent awareness of their radiation fields along with her distance just now, when she'd moved ahead of them, had alerted her to more than just the Protector's comforting aura; on a much, much lower electromagnetic frequency - likely lower than the other two could register - the big one couldn't, or maybe wouldn't, cover the mournful weight to its field, beating a slow knell into the kilometers surrounding them.

After they spent a quiet moment watching the powerfully bucking waves crashing against the moorings, the Protector gestured near its leg and she felt an odd, unpleasant twisting. When the sensation faded, the Protector held its hand to the Little Ones, and each took two of the four tiny pieces of something from its large palm. And as a shaft of light struck near them, it glinted off the surface of the pieces. She gasped toward them, unable to control her sudden reaction to such _unearthly_ beauty. Four tiny cylinders they were, but made of something that could have been pressed graphite, or could have been crushed stars - but most certainly something that dazzled with a muted brilliance, as if she was seeing the night sky on full display from the other side of a sliver-threaded, charcoal-gray veil.

These, she was sure, were four lost beacons.

And the thrum, she knew now, was a rhythm.

As if encouraged by her awareness, the Protector added another, higher frequency again; soon, she noted, the tableau of pulsing pressures would reach the organics' audible frequencies. Not that there were any around to appreciate it.

Then with its hand free, the mechanical began to rummage through the nets, separating pieces in what she thought was random order, until, when she slipped among the assorted mounds, she could see that these were all specific types of metal - some of them quite rare. All the while the three were showing body language that should have been accompanied by _some_ communication, but even their radiation fields simply expressed what they had when she first noticed them.

Perhaps they had some other method? She searched her surroundings for the electromagnetic frequencies that had become so prevalent as the organics' mode of data transfer, but found nothing. Something internal then, she decided, unique to this type of life. Whatever it was, the three were constantly shifting, tilting heads, waving appendages, and of course, tenderly stroking the little cylinders.

As the Protector finished its searching and sorting, it unfurled several cables from behind the battered glass on its chest; they snaked among the piles to aid and mimic the Protector's lone hand, and then the air then filled with the abrasive cacophony of metal being scraped, filed, and ground to a fine powder.

Once it was satisfied with the amounts gathered, the Protector began to emit several different ranges of radiation; the electromagnetic frequencies oscillating in some odd sequence that tickled through her. And seconds later she could understand. The Protector, shockingly, was manipulating the polarizations of the filings to draw smaller amounts of powder from their piles, perhaps, she guessed, further dividing them based on purity. She found that building within her was a deep regard for this mechanical and its casually masterful skill with abilities so resonant, so defining to her.

And she couldn't help the eagerness swirling through her, the anticipation, to see just what the Protector planned with its Little Ones, its lost beacons, its rhythm, and its metal powder.

Again, in unconscious answer to her thoughts, the Protector added and weaved two more frequencies to its thrum, these finally at the lowest register of audible sound.

The three then began to clear a large area around them of all debris, from uprooted light posts to a splintered rearview mirror, and when content with the size and relative cleanliness of the vicinity, the Protector sat in the middle of it and began mixing the powders in a very deliberate order. Through it all, the large mechanical was gradually amplifying the energy to its thrumming pressure waves, and had added yet another frequency to the blend; the cumulative effect of this, she realized, was an escalating percussion that was strong enough now to begin sending shudders through the defiant bay. And through her.

When The Protector joined the two Little Ones at the edge of their clearing, leaving the powder at the center, it nodded to the quadruped, who then, to her utter surprise, began to concentrate a precise and powerful beam of light at the base of the pile. She fluttered around with burning curiosity. That beam had come from the protrusions on the Little One's flanks that she'd assumed were some sort of redundant stabilizers. The urge to descend upon these three and ghost across their every surface and sigh into their every seam in exploration was forceful. But she smothered it. There was an ambient weight here that seemed to frown on her self-indulgence.

As the heat from the beam began to reach incendiary levels, the Protector finally added a melody to its earth-pounding rhythm. The first note, near the upper reaches of audible sound, was high and pure, like the chiming of a clarion bell over a vast, mirror-still lake, and the melody seemed to dance in circular steps down a descending scale. Only to start all over again, a note lower than the original, so that the overall impression was of a reluctant downward spiral, the inevitability of which was being fought with intensity and hope.

She wanted desperately to dance around them as undisciplined and uncouth as a spring gyre, the swelling heat and reverberations stirring excitement through her every atom. But, as she knew, this was not the time for her frivolity; their fields were getting noticeably thicker with sorrow, and their solemnity was prohibitive. So, while she could never _truly_ be still the way respect for this situation demanded, and she knew her mercurial fluidity would be unwelcome if they were aware of her, she offered the best that she could and paced endless circuits around them in a gravid, fog-like flow.

Just as another repetition to the Protector's melody started, the pile lit explosively to life. And it was nothing less than an _inferno_! The heat being released here threatened direly to drag her away in its undertow. And as she was moving further away from the conflagration's pull, the Protector began that odd, tingling manipulation of electromagnetic frequencies again.

It was directing them specifically to the roaring flame, and she could sense that the emissions were being swept into the skyward flood, transmuting the heat energy to boost their own power and signal. She marveled at the Protector's ingenuity! Whatever it was hoping to accomplish with this would have been impossible - though she couldn't be certain, they _were_ full of surprises - on its own, with its exhausted body and resources already committed to its Little Ones and its immersive song. But that fire, as molten and wild as it was, would feed and magnify the Protector's molded electromagnetic frequencies perfectly.

She glanced upward, following the path of the cinders and radiation, and saw that a pinprick in the cloud canopy was rippling open, incapable of resisting this forge of monstrous heat. And even as she watched, it widened to a huge, gaping eye upon the clear twilight sky beyond. An eye. Here the Protector stood tranquilly, playing its steady beat and cycling melody, a Little One perched on the good shoulder and the other cradled in the crook of its arm, while in the center of a rapidly spreading electromagnetic and thermal _hurricane_ - that it had _created_. Even her brethren were being pulled in, whipping and rushing around high above her, in delight at the might of it, the chaos in it.

That was when she saw it. Just when she'd been thinking that this tempest raging about them to the ever-loudening song of the Protector's was all there was to its plan, she saw something new and entirely out of place. At the furthest reaches of her domain, higher really, than it was safe for her to go, was a slow peppering of soft red and pink flares.

And when they appeared, the Protector added a second melody to its composition; this one full of life where the other was full of fight, full of an unstoppable joy where the other was shadowed with reluctance.

Together these melodies fit so perfectly, and underscored as they were by the unchanging rhythm and tone of that steady, throbbing beat...they spoke of triumph and defeat, of joy and sorrow, of life and loss.

And gradually, as the whirlwind of radiation grew, the flares became more insistent, the peppering bursts blending into a homogenous whole, until finally they illuminated the sky with brilliant, breathing curtains of red and blue and green, and even threads of yellow!

The Protector, with its powerful and skybound electromagnetic frequencies, had managed to derail the solar winds from their race to the planet's poles...

The Protector had brought the auroras to the center of this storm, high above this city. It had _brought _the auroras _here_.

And they rippled in resplendent waves across the firmament, dazzling her.

This...

It was unbearably beautiful.

All of it. The lights, the storm, the bass thrumming like the planet's heartbeat, the symphony. An entire elemental performance in tribute.

She ached to know that there were beings at all, worthy of something like this; to know that there was even one capable..._of_ something like this...

She didn't belong here.

Not for something this deeply private.

She could join the others like her, high up with the clouds, in their mad, gusting chases, but it would be a false gesture of kinship now - with this nameless feeling pulsing through her. Sympathy perhaps. She wasn't sure.

She closed as timid as a newborn breeze around the Protector and licked a long, slow stroke up its body, a 'thank you for letting me see this' maybe, or a commiseration, or an expression of emotions she had no name for...but undeniably a recognition, of its virtuosity. And last, a gift of favorable luck, because while many claimed Eurus was unlucky, a kiss from his daughters was anything but. So she ghosted softly over its warm metal lips.

And with a curl and swish she left the three behind her.

Something had happened here.

But she would have to look elsewhere for her answers.


End file.
